• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1831 0

out of business school at Northwestern, Mallard had attended Columbia Law (graduating in ’93, specialty: patent law). Soon after receiving his law degree and passing the bar exam, he had married the former Jane Estes (Columbia, Class of 1992), with whom he had had two children, James “Jiminy” Mallard Jr. and Mary Stuart “Gubbie” Mallard. His hobbies were listed as mountain climbing and art collecting. Using finance capital borrowed from a fellow student at Dartmouth, Mallard had bought several apartment buildings in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had fixed them up, converted them to condos, sold them for a good profit, and then had escaped from the real estate market before the bottom fell out of it. As a consequence, he had won the annual King Midas Award from the Omaha Chamber of Commerce. A year later, with an electrical engineer as partner, he had founded a privately held medical tech start-up; this company, InnovoMedic, had formulated a proton-based imaging device now commonly used for diagnoses in hospitals worldwide, the financial rewards for which—Mallard owned the patent; he had bought out his partner—were in the high nine figures. After acquiring these great riches, Mallard had divorced Jane Estes, and in 2004 had married Eleanor “Ellie” Bacon-Starhope, no college degree listed, and had fathered two more children, the twins, Angus and Gretel, both homeschooled. He owned several houses, including a brownstone on the Upper West Side in New York, another one in the desert Southwest, and this one, near Lake Superior and the city of D———. Mallard also owned a freshwater yacht, the Temps Perdu, which apparently he rarely sailed. He was noted as a fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. He served on the boards of several hospitals and charities; however, he had not appeared in public for eighteen months.

Krumholtz’s typical procedure was to research the winner and then to do follow-ups after the face-to-face interview. Most winners left behind them a slime trail of ex-wives and embittered business partners. But neither Mallard’s ex-wife nor his business partners would agree to speak to Krumholtz.

He was watching the hawk, circling slowly above him. Aloud, Krumholtz said, “I am lost. I am nowhere.” He took out his cell phone to check the time. No signal.

Several hours before, sitting in an airport lounge before his flight to D———, attended by a pleasantly overweight server with ketchup stains on her apron, Krumholtz had searched through his fact sheet for an angle. Certainly the medical device. Perhaps the art collection? The trophy wife with the preposterous name? The failed ambition to be a business-school student? The trick of buying out his partner before the medical device began to spout gobbets of cash? The rural Iowa upbringing? The liberalism? The house outside of D———? None of it seemed particularly promising. In fact the entire biography was anti-promising. Mallard might fall into that dangerous category of rich people who were non-narratable, who were story-unworthy: invisible, bland Olympians with no apparent personality and no social graces and no worldly interests of any kind apart from the amassing of treasure. Hearing the announcement of his plane’s departure, Krumholtz had tossed back his scotch, taken one last bite of his veggie-everything pizza, signaled to the server for the check, and, after having paid with the company’s credit card, had made his way down to the gate, stumbling against a refuse container near a water fountain.

Nervously he had combed his hair on the jetway before getting on board. This ritual had kept all his airplanes aloft.

Seated in row 27, wedged in between a manufacturer’s rep and a dozing matron, Krumholtz had felt an aurora of pain around his heart. He took two antacids from a roll in his pocket. After chewing and swallowing the tablets, which tasted of drywall, he felt the aurora diminish for a few moments before it returned with greater force, burning down his arm. He groaned inwardly as the plane hit an area of turbulence and the passengers were instructed